Last year I witnessed a large mob of people who were desperately seeking to be seen and heard. It was a group who felt they were being treated unjustly, because in most states they couldn’t receive legal standing as a “married couple.” Signs shouting the need for “Equal Treatment!” and for “LOVE” to rule littered the crowd. But one sign stood out to me above the others. Someone had taken the liberty to drag Jesus into the mix and put their opinion on the sign as though it was His view on the topic.
The sign read: “Jesus Is for Same-Sex Marriage.”
Really?
Had Jesus conveyed that to this individual? How?
We don’t know everything that Jesus said and did, but thankfully, Jesus did give us a definitive word on marriage that applies to this issue.
And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matt. 19:3–6).
Jesus defined the marriage model by taking the group back to Genesis where we see God create, define, and establish the institution of marriage:
God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them (Gen. 1:27).
God created two genders. Two. He repeats this distinction of two created genders in Genesis 5:2, reiterating the classification of “male and female.” He created the prototypical couple, the first marriage, as our example—male and female—united by God.
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh (Gen. 2:24).
God does not mistakenly create a male body to house a “female spirit” or create “two-spirited” people” (as the North American Indian tradition promotes) that house both female and male spirits. God created male and female. Within those genders, individuals may have a variety of tendencies that are not stereotypical of their particular gender, but the individual is created by God as male or female.
The truth is, we were created with gender and created for the purpose of displaying God’s image to others
It is obvious that many people today (in increasing numbers) struggle with their gender identity. We should reach out to them and seek to help them, just as we should assist anyone who is struggling with any issue. We live in a fallen world where all individuals begin with a warped view of their personal identity, and to some extent we all struggle with “identity confusion.”
But the truth is, we were created with gender and created for the purpose of displaying God’s image to others.
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